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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Idea for KDE 4 - global, smooth zoom feature.
From:       "Diego Moya \(a.k.a. TuringTest\)" <turingt () gmail ! com>
Date:       2005-05-25 22:57:19
Message-ID: 11ee049405052515575961961f () mail ! gmail ! com
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On 25/05/05, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo@kde.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 May 2005 02:06, Diego Moya (a.k.a. TuringTest) wrote:
> > > trying to present everything along 2 different metaphores seems to me to
> > > be rather antiproductive.
> >
> > That's a valid concern. The original "Humane Interface" ZUI proposal
> > was supposed to completely replace windows. Related areas would be
> > achieved with smaller boxes inside boxes to which you could zoom in.
> 
> boxes, windows ... the difference is 2D vs 3D, and i really don't see us being
> able to flatten the desktop down to 2D. it's actually going  the OTHER way
> (additional dimensions) with things like presence (which introduces a time
> element) and embedded documents.

Infinite zooming is your 3rd Dimension. The only thing you could miss
from a desktop is the overlapping, and why do you need that? You can
replace it with "always visible" miniatures of your objects stacked
side-by-side.

You can have embedded documents - they are actually 2D now, they're
"inside" the container. Being able to see them bigger doesn't change
anything. (And what do you mean by presence? Isn't that a box with
your buddy list floating somewhere?)

You can even have persistent always-on-screen information - in ZUIs
that's the idea of "sticking" things to the camera.


> we can get rid of stacked windows by increasing the section of the plane we
> represent to the user, but we can't diminish the dimensions between data.
> that's the real issue at hand IMHO.

You already have only 2 dimensions on the desktop. How does adding
zoom to the mixture worsen that? A desktop with windows IS a spatial
interface, just a very messy one. Even virtual desktops are "side by
side".


> not to mention you'd need one hell of a plane section to show the files on my
> system ;)

No problem, it's infinite... :-P


> 
> > The concept of "clones" (similar to soft links) could be used to have
> > different, alternate mappings at the same time.
> >
> > The advantage of Zooming User Interfaces over windows is that they're
> > truly "spatial", you can use positional memory to remember where
> > things were located.
> 
> spacial tops out. do you remember where everything in your house is? i know i
> don't. 

You don't have "Google for my keys" in your house when your memory
fails. But you can have that in your computer. And for when you
remember the location, can you imagine having to blindly type:

/doorway/hall/right-wall/chest-of-drawers/drawer1/key 

instead of just "i can see my keys from here, just zoom there"?
Autocompletion is not enough. In Konqueror you can't see anything but
the current folder, the rest of the hierarchy is hidden.

In a ZUI you see everything at once - except if it is very small, but
then you can see -and visually remember- the surrounding context. And
there's nothing wrong with having "lens" tools to search for small
things without "moving" there first.


> spacial is great for small sets of data, not the
> data warehouses that our PCs (let alone LANs) have become.

Spatial is not intended to *replace* all other methods of access but
mainly make sense of them. Now system objects are "somewhere inside
the hard disk". Not very intuitive. In a ZUI you could remember "I
left that document near the box of trailer previews, just after I
downloaded the teaser of Episode III".

Actually, can you think of *anything* that you can do on a desktop and
you can't do on an infinite desktop? (other than hide things under
other things and lose them from view).


> 
> in this case, i think Raskin was out to lunch.
> 
Actually he did what we aren't doing here. He tested his designs on
real users, and his proposals are the result of several iterations.


> everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler (- Einstein). IMHO
> Raskin was trying to make things simple beyond "possible". thankfully
> simplicity is not the only route to usability.

The Humane Interface (now called Archy) is no more simple than the
command line (what could be simpler than that?) and is equally
powerful. Actually is almost the same idea as Emacs, only with better
interface design. Isn't Emacs prepared to manage the complexity of our
current PCs and networks?
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